1 R. Schuman Miami-Florida European Union Center of Excellence ASEAN: A Prime Example of Regionalism in Southeast Asia Katja Weber Vol. 6, No. 5 April 2009 Published with the support of the EU Commission. 2 EUMA European Union Miami Analysis (EUMA), Special Series, is a service of analytical essays on current, trend setting issues and developing news about the European Union. These papers are produced by the Jean Monnet Chair, in cooperation with the Miami-Florida European Union Center of Excellence (a partnership of the University of Miami and Florida International University) as an outreach service for the academic, business and diplomatic communities. Among the topics to be included in the series, the following are suggested: The collapse of the Constitution and its rescue Turkey: prospects of membership Immigration crisis and cultural challenges Security threats and responses The EU and Latin America The EU as a model and reference in the world The Common Agricultural Policy and other public subsidies The euro and the dollar EU image in the United States These topics form part of the pressing agenda of the EU and represent the multifaceted and complex nature of the European integration process. These papers also seek to highlight the internal and external dynamics which influence the workings of the EU and its relationship with the rest the world. Miami - Florida European Union Center Jean Monnet Chair Staff University of Miami Joaquín Roy (Director) 1000 Memorial Drive Astrid Boening (Associate Director) 101 Ferré Building María Lorca (Associate Editor) Coral Gables, FL 33124-2231 Maxime Larive (Research Assistant) Phone: 305-284-3266 Fax: (305) 284 4406 Web: www.miami.edu/eucenter Florida International University Elisabeth Prugl (FIU, Co-Director) Inter-American Jean Monnet Chair Editorial Board: Carlos Hakansson, Universidad de Piura, Perú Finn Laursen, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada Michel Levi-Coral, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador José Luis Martínez-Estay¸ Universidad de los Andes, Santiago de Chile, Chile Félix Peña, Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentina Stephan Sberro, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México Eric Tremolada, Universidad del Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia International Jean Monnet Chair Editorial Advisors: Francesc Granell, University of Barcelona, Spain Ramūnas Vilpišauskas, Vilnius University, Lithuania 3 ASEAN: A Prime Example of Regionalism in Southeast Asia♦ ♣ Katja Weber The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to create a basis for comparisons with other examples of regionalism such as the European Union, NAFTA, the African Union, or Mercosur, to name but a few. To facilitate this task, I divided the paper into the following nine subheadings: 1.) Historical Background 2.) Rationale for Regionalism/Integration, Main Developments and Expansion 3.) Legal Framework 4.) Institutions/Decision-Making 5.) Economy 6.) Security 7.) External Relations 8.) Theories 9.) Setbacks and Prospects Historical Background Since, as Frank Frost (1990: 2) explains, “geographic characteristics of the area discouraged regular contact and communication, the ancient kingdoms of Southeast Asia developed largely in isolation from each other.” Yet, easy access by sea left the region vulnerable to interference by external powers and thus, by the nineteenth century, Southeast Asians became victims of European colonialism. During World War II, Japan expelled the Western colonial powers from the region and subjected it to a brutal occupation. Following World War II, the Southeast Asian countries gradually gained independence from their colonizers, but only to become part of the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and “a battleground in the conflict between China and the Soviet Union” (Narine 2002: 10). The perception of external threat, therefore, was an essential component in the ♦ Paper presented at The European Union and Comparative Regionalism, a symposium sponsored by the Miami- Florida European Union Center of Excellence, April 6, 2009 ♣ Katja Weber Katja Weber (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles) is Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech. Her research interests center around European and East Asian security issues, theories of integration, and German foreign policy. She is the author of Hierarchy Amidst Anarchy: Transaction Costs and Institutional Choice (SUNY Press, 2000), co-author (with Paul Kowert) of Cultures of Order: Leadership, Language, and Social Reconstruction in Germany and Japan, (SUNY Press, 2007), and co-editor (with Michael Baun and Michael Smith) of Governing Europe's Neighborhood: Partners or Periphery? (Manchester University Press, 2007). She has also published a number of articles in the Journal of European Integration, Journal of European Public Policy, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Politics, and has received research support from the SSRC Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation/Ford Foundation, the American Political Science Foundation, and the European Commission, among others. During the fall of 2008 she was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Graduate School of Law & Politics at the University of Tokyo. 4 promotion of regionalism in Southeast Asia, along-side concerns regarding intra-regional predators and internal communist insurgencies. Given the great uncertainty surrounding the behavior of the USSR and China in the aftermath of the Second World War, the US took a first step to promote regionalism in Southeast Asia. In 1954, together with France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan, the US founded the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region. However since, “[u]nlike NATO, SEATO had no independent mechanism for obtaining intelligence or deploying military forces, [its] … potential for collective action was necessarily limited.”i SEATO held annual joint military exercises and engaged in consultation, but suffered from a lack of “credibility” and therefore was disbanded in 1977. Another attempt at promoting regional order was made by the South Korean president Park Chung-hee with the creation of the Asian Pacific Council (ASPAC) in 1966, but this grouping of anti-communist states disintegrated in 1972. The next two efforts to establish order were made exclusively by Southeast Asian countries, without any outside help. In 1961 Malaya, the Philippines and Thailand gave rise to the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA). Whereas Malaya and the Philippines preferred an arrangement with significant institutional structures, Thailand favored a much less binding commitment and eventually got its way. The ASA ran into trouble when the Philippines decided to lay claim on Sabah (territory which the British had intended to include in the proposed Federation of Malaysia). This dispute between the Philippines and what then became known as Malaysia (an amalgamation of Malaya, Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak) rendered the ASA ineffective for the following years. MAPHILINDO (a grouping of Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia) was founded in 1963, but was weakened significantly shortly after it had come about, due to the creation of the Federation of Malaysia which neither Indonesia nor the Philippines recognized (Narine 2002: 10- 12). Between 1963 and 1966, President Sukarno of Indonesia then pursued konfrontasi--a policy of confrontation and regional disruption--with Malaysia and Singapore, once the latter had been expelled from Malaysia in 1965. The idea was to destabilize Malaysia through limited military action, economic sanctions and propaganda. Konfrontasi finally ended when Sukarno was deposed by the military in 1966. Even though both the ASA and MAPHILINDO collapsed, due to the above described internal hostilities, they were important precursors of ASEAN (Frost 1990: 4). The disputes between these countries made the need for regional cooperation abundantly clear and, ultimately, led to new discussions which on August 8, 1967, gave rise to ASEAN. Rationale for Regionalism/Integration, Main Developments and Expansion By founding ASEAN, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines hoped to accomplish three main objectives. First, they sought to reduce tensions and competition among themselves, i.e., Southeast Asia’s non-communist states. Second, they hoped that by promoting domestic socio-economic development, it would be easier for them to tackle internal communist challenges and/or deal with externally sponsored communist insurgencies. Third, they sought to reduce the regional military influence of external actors by expressly stating that foreign military bases in the region should be temporary (Narine 2002: 13). Since most of the ASEAN states are still “deeply engaged in the process of state-building,…their most important concern is to maintain and promote their rights and security as sovereign states” (ibid. p. 3). Or, put differently, when it comes to ranking norms, sovereignty wins out over all others. Mindful not to provoke other countries in the region, like Vietnam, but also unable to see eye-to-eye on security matters, and lacking the military means to bring about a credible security apparatus, the ASEAN members carefully spelled out in the Bangkok Declaration that their main goals shall